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How a creationist instinct stops us seeing evolution everywhere

Free-market evangelism spoils an otherwise good book, which attempts to extend the theory of evolution beyond biology to human culture and institutions

By Graham Lawton

FOR most of history, humans were instinctive creationists. Faced with the intricate perfection of an eye or a wing, they jumped to the conclusion that it was designed by an intelligent creator, aka God.

Then along came Darwin and proved the obvious wrong. The appearance of design is an illusion; biological order arises by slow, undirected trial-and-error coupled with natural selection, aka evolution.

Evolution now reigns supreme as the explanation of biological complexity. But, according to veteran science writer Matt Ridley in his new book, The Evolution of Everything, most people remain instinctive creationists. Even those who have no trouble with biological evolution fail to see it at work elsewhere, especially in human culture and institutions.

So when we encounter a complex human system, we default to the assumption that it is the product of design. But just as with eyes and wings, this appearance is an illusion; successful human institutions emerge from the bottom up, driven by natural selection among competing ideas.

That is the central thesis of this highly readable, invariably interesting but ultimately maddening book. The Darwinian revolution is unfinished, says Ridley; like relativity, the theory of evolution should be considered a “special theory”, applicable only in the limited sphere of biological change. It needs to be extended to a “general theory”, which also applies to the human world.

“The appearance of design is an illusion; biological order arises by slow, undirected trial and error”

Ridley’s laudable aim is to disenthral us of our intuitive creationism and make us see evolution at work everywhere: “I want to do for… the human world a little bit of what Charles Darwin did for biology, and get you to see past the illusion of design, to see the emergent, unplanned, inexorable and beautiful process of change that lies beneath.”

By that measure, Ridley succeeds in spades, with lucid accounts of the evolution of culture, technology, the economy, the internet and more. In full flow, he possesses the rare power to see the world in a different light – one made not by great men or women but by undirected, incremental change.

If Ridley had left his ambitions at that, this would be a very good book. But he doesn’t, and it suffers as a result. His argument quickly – and predictably, for anyone who read his previous book, The Rational Optimist – degenerates into a manifesto for unfettered free markets and right-wing libertarianism. This leads to familiar neo-liberal territory: the state should limit itself to defence of the realm and enforcing the law – and then get out of the way.

In this world view, top-down solutions only lead to failure, if not disaster. This is undeniably true in many instances, as the history of the 20th century attests. But he lets evangelism get the better of him, and ends up striding blindly into another human fallacy, the is/ought problem: just because many successful institutions evolved, all institutions ought to be created thus – in other words, left to market forces.

But as a prescription rather than a description of how human society works, evolution swiftly loses its appeal. The human world of which Ridley writes is not just composed of cultural entities, institutions and inventions, but of real people. For them, a Darwinian world is a brutal one where only the very fittest survive.

Perhaps that is why Ridley has to cherry-pick so furiously to disguise or deny the human cost of his – let’s not shy away from it – social Darwinism. For example, he trumpets the achievements of private schools, but somehow fails to mention that this may have something to do with their ability to select the brightest students from the wealthiest backgrounds. And he claims that, had the NHS not been created, private health provision in the UK would have evolved into a market-driven system that “catered to the needs of all, especially the poor”.

This, at least, begs him to defend the brutal US system, which left about 50 million, mostly poor, people without health coverage until the state stepped in. If this could be blamed on heavy-handed regulation, you can bet that Ridley would have laid the blame there (as he does for the 2008 financial crisis, in which he was a key player as chairman of the failed UK bank Northern Rock). But the free market gets a free ride.

Even more astonishingly, he tells us that “global inequality is currently falling fast” – a claim so counter to the dominant narrative that it demands explanation. But beyond saying that people in poor countries are getting richer faster than people in rich countries (are they? by what measure? over what time period?), we don’t get one.

Ridley’s is a fundamentalist world view that brooks no dissent; everything can be twisted or elided to support the argument. This seems lost on him, even as he gleefully skewers Freudianism and other pseudoscientific theories of the human condition: “The characteristics of a mystical, and hence untrustworthy, theory are that it is not refutable, that it appeals to authority, that it relies heavily on anecdote… and that it takes the moral high ground.” Indeed.